Metagrapher — convenient Python library for obtaining readable Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) and other Latin script identifiers generated from strings written in different languages, using non-standard characters and UTF-8 symbols. Also, this technique is called transliteration or romanization.
Coming soon...
pip3 install metagrapher
At the moment, Metagrapher supports the following language pairs (in alphabetic order):
- Arabic → English (ar_en) [draft]
- Armenian → English (hy_en)
- Azerbaijani → English (az_en)
- Burmese → English (br_en) [draft]
- Chinese → English (zh_en)
- Czech → English (cz_en)
- Deutsch → English (de_en)
- Divehi → English (dv_en)
- English → Russian (en_ru)
- Finnish → English (fi_en)
- French → English (fr_en)
- Greek → English (el_en)
- Hungarian → English (hu_en)
- Japanese → English (jp_en)
- Lithuanian → English (lt_en)
- Latin → English (la_en)
- Latvian → English (lv_en)
- Makedonian → English (mk_en)
- Polish → English (pl_en)
- Portuguese → English (pt_en)
- Romanian → English (ro_en)
- Russian → English (ru_en)
- Serbian → English (sr_en)
- Slovak → English (sk_en)
- Thai → English (th_en) [draft]
- Turkish → English (tr_en)
- Turkmen → English (tk_en)
- Ukrainian → English (uk_en)
- Vietnamese → English (vi_en)
- Unicode Symbols → English* ('symbols_en')
A primary intention of this library is to create readable identifiers for any items, mostly — so called semantic URLs, which is more readable to live users, legacy software and to search engines.
This library will help to generate a readable identifier from the any string with “non-standard” (for Latin alphabet) characters, as well as from strings written in another language. If your primary language is English, I bet that the following URL will be absolutely unreadable for you: http://goodi.es/волшебство/الرغبات السرية/. Furthermore, this URL cannot be read for some legacy software and hardware. Metagrapher will kindly convert the above mentioned URL to user- and machine-readable: http://goodi.es/volshebstvo/alrghbat-alsryh.
- Language-specific conversion (if you want to convert from specific language to English consciously):
import Metagrapher
print( Metagrapher('матрёшка водка бабушка балалайка').ru_en() )Will output: matryoshka vodka babushka balalayka
- If you want to convert only additional UTF-characters like ♥ or ☣, for instance, you can use the
symbols_en()method:
Metagrapher('I ♥ NY and want a cup of ☕ right now!').symbols_en().lower().slugify('_')Will generate: i_love_ny_and_want_a_cup_of_coffee_right_now
Oh, by the way, slugify() will remove any non-readable characters and provide you with a ready-to-use string. As an argument, method slugify() will accept any string for delimiting words, - (will be used by default).
And, as you might think, a lower() method will lower-case all upper-cased characters.
One of the strong sides of Metagrapher is a delicate case conversion. For instance, Metagrapher will preserve the case for transliterated string: 'ШАПКА Юлии' by default will translate to 'SHAPKA Yulii', other libraries will convert this string to 'ShAPKA Yulii' or even to 'SHAPKA YUlii', and 'ШАШКА ЧАПАЯ' to 'ShAShKA ChAPAYa'.
- If you intend to translate only currency signs, like $ or €, or £, etc. to readable text, you can use
currencies_en()method:
Metagrapher('new t-shirts for only € 3,60').currencies().slugify()Will generate: New-t-shirts-for-only-EUR-360
- Finally, you can chain methods (and languages, accordingly) in an elegant and logical way:
Metagrapher('Здравствуйте, ♥ Labą dieną! ∞ teşekkür 100 ₺ için')
.ru_en().pl_en().tr_en().symbols_en().currencies_en().upper().slugify()Will output: ZDRAVSTVUYTE-LOVE-LABA-DIENA-INFINITY-TESHEKKUR-100-TRY-ICHIN
- To use Chinese, Japanese and/or Korean languages, please instantiate Metagrapher with an argument
take_from_cjk='c, j, k', where 'c' — Chinese, 'j' — Japanese, and 'k' is Korean. This flag will allow you to load relatively “heavy” dictionaries at the library startup (this procedure will add ~0.02 s. for Chinese, ~0.1 s. for Japanese, and ~0.05 s. for Korean on the initialization stage). Also you have an option to load these languages at any later time — just useload_cjk()with the same keyword argumenttake_from_cjk, or as the first positional argument:
# 'j' loads Japanese dicts:
Metagrapher('ワウ', take_from_cjk='j').jp_en().get()
# 'c' will load Chinese dictionaries:
Metagrapher().load_cjk('c').zh_en('哇').get()
# 'k,c' will hook up Chinese and Korean languages:
Metagrapher("好运").load_cjk(take_from_cjk='k,c').zh_en().get()
# You can freely combine markers 'c' (Chinese), 'j' (Japanese) and 'k' (Korean)
# in the positional argument, or keyword argument take_from_cjk():
Metagrapher(take_from_cjk='j,k').jp_en('できます').load_cjk('c').zh_en('改变语言').get()- Completely automatic non-language-specific conversion available by methods with
any_at the beginning of name. For example, transliteration of all characters from all languages to English can be done with the magic methodany_en(). It is generally usable for programmatically slugifying any headers or user names:
transliteration = Metagrapher('嚜鮙گرอาพέρ', 'cjk').any_en()
print(transliteration)Output: metagrapher
P.S. Don't forget to use the take_from_cjk=True or load_cjk() method for Chinese, Japanese and Korean ideographs!
- You can customize substitutions manually and override language pairs this way:
Metagrapher('My ♥ is beating').symbols_en(override={'♥': 'heart'})Output without overriding: My love is beating
With overriding: My heart is beating
Or you can even provide your custom set of substitutions:
print( Metagrapher('Making bad things again')
.custom({'bad': 'good', 'again': 'as always', ' ': ' ♥ '}) )Result: Making ♥ good ♥ things ♥ as ♥ always
P.S. Useful resources, that you can borrow from Metagrapher: